"NEITHER IN THIS MOUNTAIN NOR AT JERUSALEM."
The next morning, it being again necessary for Edith to report at her
post of duty, I accompanied her to the railway station. While we stood
waiting for the train my attention was drawn to a distinguished-looking
man who alighted from an incoming car. He appeared by nineteenth-century
standards about sixty years old, and was therefore presumably eighty or
ninety, that being about the rate of allowance I have found it necessary
to make in estimating the ages of my new contemporaries, owing to the
slower advent of signs of age in these times. On speaking to Edith of
this person I was much interested when she informed me that he was no
other than Mr. Barton, whose sermon by telephone had so impressed me on
the first Sunday of my new life, as set forth in Looking Backward. Edith
had just time to introduce me before taking the train.
As we left the station together I said to my companion that if he would
excuse the inquiry I should be interested to know what particular sect or
religious body he represented.
"My dear Mr. West," was the reply, "your question suggests that my friend
Dr. Leete has not probably said much to you about the modern way of
regarding religious matters."
"Our conversation has turned but little on that subject," I answered,
"but it will not surprise me to learn that your ideas and practices are
quite different from those of my day. Indeed, religious ideas and
ecclesiastical institutions were already at that time undergoing such
rapid and radical decomposition that it was safe to predict if religion
were to survive another century it would be under very different forms
from any the past had known."
"You have suggested a topic," said my companion, "of the greatest
possible interest to me. If you have nothing else to do, and would like
to talk a little about it, nothing would give me more pleasure."
Upon receiving the assurance that I had absolutely no occupation except
to pick up information about the twentieth century, Mr. Barton said:
"Let us then go into this old church, which you will no doubt have
already recognized as a relic of your time. There we can sit comfortably
while we talk, amid surroundings well fitted to our theme."
I then perceived that we stood before one of the last-century church
buildings which have been preserved as historical monuments, and,
moreover, as it oddly enough fell out, that this particular church was no
other than the one my family had always attended, and I as well--that is,
whenever I attended any church, which was not often.
"What an extraordinary coincidence!" exclaimed Mr. Barton, when I told
him this; "who would have expected it? Naturally, when you revisit a spot
so fraught with affecting associations, you will wish to be alone. You
must pardon my involuntary indiscretion in proposing to turn in here."
"Really," I replied, "the coincidence is interesting merely, not at all
affecting. Young men of my day did not, as a rule, take their church
relations very seriously. I shall be interested to see how the old place
looks. Let us go in, by all means."
The interior proved to be quite unchanged in essential particulars since
the last time I had been within its walls, more than a century before.
That last occasion, I well remembered, had been an Easter service, to
which I had escorted some pretty country cousins who wanted to hear the
music and see the flowers. No doubt the processes of decay had rendered
necessary many restorations, but they had been carried out so as to
preserve completely the original effects.
Leading the way down the main aisle, I paused in front of the family pew.
"This, Mr. Barton," I said, "is, or was, my pew. It is true that I am a
little in arrears on pew rent, but I think I may venture to invite you to
sit with me."
I had truly told Mr. Barton that there was very little sentiment
connected with such church relations as I had maintained. They were
indeed merely a matter of family tradition and social propriety. But in
another way I found myself not a little moved, as, dropping into my
accustomed place at the head of the pew, I looked about the dim and
silent interior. As my eye roved from pew to pew, my imagination called
back to life the men and women, the young men and maidens, who had been
wont of a Sunday, a hundred years before, to sit in those places. As I
recalled their various activities, ambitions, hopes, fears, envies, and
intrigues, all dominated, as they had been, by the idea of money
possessed, lost, or lusted after, I was impressed not so much with the
personal death which had come to these my old acquaintances as by the
thought of the completeness with which the whole social scheme in which
they had lived and moved and had their being had passed away. Not only
were they gone, but their world was gone, and its place knew it no more.
How strange, how artificial, how grotesque that world had been!--and yet
to them and to me, while I was one of them, it had seemed the only
possible mode of existence.
Mr. Barton, with delicate respect for my absorption, waited for me to
break the silence.
"No doubt," I said, "since you preserve our churches as curiosities, you
must have better ones of your own for use?"
"In point of fact," my companion replied, "we have little or no use for
churches at all."
"Ah, yes! I had forgotten for the moment that it was by telephone I heard
your sermon. The telephone, in its present perfection, must indeed have
quite dispensed with the necessity of the church as an audience room."
"In other words," replied Mr. Barton, "when we assemble now we need no
longer bring our bodies with us. It is a curious paradox that while the
telephone and electroscope, by abolishing distance as a hindrance to
sight and hearing, have brought mankind into a closeness of sympathetic
and intellectual rapport never before imagined, they have at the same
time enabled individuals, although keeping in closest touch with
everything going on in the world, to enjoy, if they choose, a physical
privacy, such as one had to be a hermit to command in your day. Our
advantages in this respect have so far spoiled us that being in a crowd,
which was the matter-of-course penalty you had to pay for seeing or
hearing anything interesting, would seem too dear a price to pay for
almost any enjoyment."
"I can imagine," I said, "that ecclesiastical institutions must have been
affected in other ways besides the disuse of church buildings, by the
general adaptation of the telephone system to religious teaching. In my
day, the fact that no speaker could reach by voice more than a small
group of hearers made it necessary to have a veritable army of
preachers--some fifty thousand, say, in the United States alone--in order
to instruct the population. Of these, not one in many hundreds was a
person who had anything to utter really worth hearing. For example, we
will say that fifty thousand clergymen preached every Sunday as many
sermons to as many congregations. Four fifths of these sermons were poor,
half of the rest perhaps fair, some of the others good, and a few score,
possibly, out of the whole really of a fine class. Now, nobody, of
course, would hear a poor discourse on any subject when he could just as
easily hear a fine one, and if we had perfected the telephone system to
the point you have, the result would have been, the first Sunday after
its introduction, that everybody who wanted to hear a sermon would have
connected with the lecture rooms or churches of the few widely celebrated
preachers, and the rest would have had no hearers at all, and presently
have been obliged to seek new occupations."
Mr. Barton was amused. "You have, in fact, hit," he said, "upon the
mechanical side of one of the most important contrasts between your times
and ours--namely, the modern suppression of mediocrity in teaching,
whether intellectual or religious. Being able to pick from the choicest
intellects, and most inspired moralists and seers of the generation,
everybody of course agrees in regarding it a waste of time to listen to
any who have less weighty messages to deliver. When you consider that all
are thus able to obtain the best inspiration the greatest minds can give,
and couple this with the fact that, thanks to the universality of the
higher education, all are at least pretty good judges of what is best,
you have the secret of what might be called at once the strongest
safeguard of the degree of civilization we have attained, and the surest
pledge of the highest possible rate of progress toward ever better
conditions--namely, the leadership of moral and intellectual genius. To
one like you, educated according to the ideas of the nineteenth century
as to what democracy meant, it may seem like a paradox that the
equalizing of economic and educational conditions, which has perfected
democracy, should have resulted in the most perfect aristocracy, or
government by the best, that could be conceived; yet what result could be
more matter-of-course? The people of to-day, too intelligent to be misled
or abused for selfish ends even by demigods, are ready, on the other
hand, to comprehend and to follow with enthusiasm every better leading.
The result is, that our greatest men and women wield to-day an unselfish
empire, more absolute than your czars dreamed of, and of an extent to
make Alexander's conquests seem provincial. There are men in the world
who when they choose to appeal to their fellow-men, by the bare
announcement are able to command the simultaneous attention of one to
five or eight hundred millions of people. In fact, if the occasion be a
great one, and the speaker worthy of it, a world-wide silence reigns as
in their various places, some beneath the sun and others under the stars,
some by the light of dawn and others at sunset, all hang on the lips of
the teacher. Such power would have seemed, perhaps, in your day
dangerous, but when you consider that its tenure is conditional on the
wisdom and unselfishness of its exercise, and would fail with the first
false note, you may judge that it is a dominion as safe as God's."
"Dr. Leete," I said, "has told me something of the way in which the
universality of culture, combined with your scientific appliances, has
made physically possible this leadership of the best; but, I beg your
pardon, how could a speaker address numbers so vast as you speak of
unless the pentecostal miracle were repeated? Surely the audience must be
limited at least by the number of those understanding one language."
"Is it possible that Dr. Leete has not told you of our universal
language?"
"I have heard no language but English."
"Of course, everybody talks the language of his own country with his
countrymen, but with the rest of the world he talks the general
language--that is to say, we have nowadays to acquire but two languages
to talk to all peoples--our own, and the universal. We may learn as many
more as we please, and we usually please to learn many, but these two are
alone needful to go all over the world or to speak across it without an
interpreter. A number of the smaller nations have wholly abandoned their
national tongue and talk only the general language. The greater nations,
which have fine literature embalmed in their languages, have been more
reluctant to abandon them, and in this way the smaller folks have
actually had a certain sort of advantage over the greater. The tendency,
however, to cultivate but one language as a living tongue and to treat
all the others as dead or moribund is increasing at such a rate that if
you had slept through another generation you might have found none but
philological experts able to talk with you."
"But even with the universal telephone and the universal language," I
said, "there still remains the ceremonial and ritual side of religion to
be considered. For the practice of that I should suppose the piously
inclined would still need churches to assemble in, however able to
dispense with them for purposes of instruction."
"If any feel that need, there is no reason why they should not have as
many churches as they wish and assemble as often as they see fit. I do
not know but there are still those who do so. But with a high grade of
intelligence become universal the world was bound to outgrow the
ceremonial side of religion, which with its forms and symbols, its holy
times and places, its sacrifices, feasts, fasts, and new moons, meant so
much in the child-time of the race. The time has now fully come which
Christ foretold in that talk with the woman by the well of Samaria when
the idea of the Temple and all it stood for would give place to the
wholly spiritual religion, without respect of times or places, which he
declared most pleasing to God.
"With the ritual and ceremonial side of religion outgrown," said I, "with
church attendance become superfluous for purposes of instruction, and
everybody selecting his own preacher on personal grounds, I should say
that sectarian lines must have pretty nearly disappeared."
"Ah, yes!" said Mr. Barton, "that reminds me that our talk began with
your inquiry as to what religious sect I belonged to. It is a very long
time since it has been customary for people to divide themselves into
sects and classify themselves under different names on account of
variations of opinion as to matters of religion."
"Is it possible," I exclaimed, "that you mean to say people no longer
quarrel over religion? Do you actually tell me that human beings have
become capable of entertaining different opinions about the next world
without becoming enemies in this? Dr. Leete has compelled me to believe a
good many miracles, but this is too much."
"I do not wonder that it seems rather a startling proposition, at first
statement, to a man of the nineteenth century," replied Mr. Barton. "But,
after all, who was it who started and kept up the quarreling over
religion in former days?"
"It was, of course, the ecclesiastical bodies--the priests and
preachers."
"But they were not many. How were they able to make so much trouble?"
"On account of the masses of the people who, being densely ignorant, were
correspondingly superstitious and bigoted, and were tools in the hands of
the ecclesiastics."
"But there was a minority of the cultured. Were they bigoted also? Were
they tools of the ecclesiastics?"
"On the contrary, they always held a calm and tolerant attitude on
religious questions and were independent of the priesthoods. If they
deferred to ecclesiastical influence at all, it was because they held it
needful for the purpose of controlling the ignorant populace."
"Very good. You have explained your miracle. There is no ignorant
populace now for whose sake it is necessary for the more intelligent to
make any compromises with truth. Your cultured class, with their tolerant
and philosophical view of religious differences, and the criminal folly
of quarreling about them, has become the only class there is."
"How long is it since people ceased to call themselves Catholics,
Protestants, Baptists, Methodists, and so on?"
"That kind of classification may be said to have received a fatal shock
at the time of the great Revolution, when sectarian demarcations and
doctrinal differences, already fallen into a good deal of disregard, were
completely swept away and forgotten in the passionate impulse of
brotherly love which brought men together for the founding of a nobler
social order. The old habit might possibly have revived in time had it
not been for the new culture, which, during the first generation
subsequent to the Revolution, destroyed the soil of ignorance and
superstition which had supported ecclesiastical influence, and made its
recrudescence impossible for evermore.
"Although, of course," continued my companion, "the universalizing of
intellectual culture is the only cause that needs to be considered in
accounting for the total disappearance of religious sectarianism, yet it
will give you a more vivid realization of the gulf fixed between the
ancient and the modern usages as to religion if you consider certain
economic conditions, now wholly passed away, which in your time
buttressed the power of ecclesiastical institutions in very substantial
ways. Of course, in the first place, church buildings were needful to
preach in, and equally so for the ritual and ceremonial side of religion.
Moreover, the sanction of religious teaching, depending chiefly on the
authority of tradition instead of its own reasonableness, made it
necessary for any preacher who would command hearers to enter the service
of some of the established sectarian organizations. Religion, in a word,
like industry and politics, was capitalized by greater or smaller
corporations which exclusively controlled the plant and machinery, and
conducted it for the prestige and power of the firms. As all those who
desired to engage in politics or industry were obliged to do so in
subjection to the individuals and corporations controlling the machinery,
so was it in religious matters likewise. Persons desirous of entering on
the occupation of religious teaching could do so only by conforming to
the conditions of some of the organizations controlling the machinery,
plant, and good will of the business--that is to say, of some one of the
great ecclesiastical corporations. To teach religion outside of these
corporations, when not positively illegal, was a most difficult
undertaking, however great the ability of the teacher--as difficult,
indeed, as it was to get on in politics without wearing a party badge, or
to succeed in business in opposition to the great capitalists. The
would-be religious teacher had to attach himself, therefore, to some one
or other of the sectarian organizations, whose mouthpiece he must consent
to be, as the condition of obtaining any hearing at all. The organization
might be hierarchical, in which case he took his instructions from above,
or it might be congregational, in which case he took his orders from
below. The one method was monarchical, the other democratic, but one as
inconsistent as the other with the office of the religious teacher, the
first condition of which, as we look at it, should be absolute
spontaneity of feeling and liberty of utterance.
"It may be said that the old ecclesiastical system depended on a double
bondage: first, the intellectual subjection of the masses through
ignorance to their spiritual directors; and, secondly, the bondage of the
directors themselves to the sectarian organizations, which as spiritual
capitalists monopolized the opportunities of teaching. As the bondage was
twofold, so also was the enfranchisement--a deliverance alike of the
people and of their teachers, who, under the guise of leaders, had been
themselves but puppets. Nowadays preaching is as free as hearing, and as
open to all. The man who feels a special calling to talk to his fellows
upon religious themes has no need of any other capital than something
worth saying. Given this, without need of any further machinery than the
free telephone, he is able to command an audience limited only by the
force and fitness of what he has to say. He now does not live by his
preaching. His business is not a distinct profession. He does not belong
to a class apart from other citizens, either by education or occupation.
It is not needful for any purpose that he should do so. The higher
education which he shares with all others furnishes ample intellectual
equipment, while the abundant leisure for personal pursuits with which
our life is interfused, and the entire exemption from public duty after
forty-five, give abundant opportunity for the exercise of his vocation.
In a word, the modern religious teacher is a prophet, not a priest. The
sanction of his words lies not in any human ordination or ecclesiastical
_exequatur,_ but, even as it was with the prophets of old, in such
response as his words may have power to evoke from human hearts."
"If people," I suggested, "still retaining a taste for the old-time
ritual and ceremonial observances and face-to-face preaching, should
desire to have churches and clergy for their special service, is there
anything to prevent it?"
"No, indeed. Liberty is the first and last word of our civilization. It
is perfectly consistent with our economic system for a group of
individuals, by contributing out of their incomes, not only to rent
buildings for group purposes, but by indemnifying the nation for the loss
of an individual's public service to secure him as their special
minister. Though the state will enforce no private contracts of any sort,
it does not forbid them. The old ecclesiastical system was, for a time
after the Revolution, kept up by remnants in this way, and might be until
now if anybody had wished. But the contempt into which the hireling
relation had fallen at once after the Revolution soon made the position
of such hired clergymen intolerable, and presently there were none who
would demean themselves by entering upon so despised a relation, and
none, indeed, who would have spiritual service, of all others, on such
terms."
"As you tell the story," I said, "it seems very plain how it all came
about, and could not have been otherwise; but you can perhaps hardly
imagine how a man of the nineteenth century, accustomed to the vast place
occupied by the ecclesiastical edifice and influence in human affairs, is
affected by the idea of a world getting on without anything of the sort."
"I can imagine something of your sensation," replied my companion,
"though doubtless not adequately. And yet I must say that no change in
the social order seems to us to have been more distinctly foreshadowed by
the signs of the times in your day than precisely this passing away of
the ecclesiastical system. As you yourself observed, just before we came
into this church, there was then going on a general deliquescence of
dogmatism which made your contemporaries wonder what was going to be
left. The influence and authority of the clergy were rapidly
disappearing, the sectarian lines were being obliterated, the creeds were
falling into contempt, and the authority of tradition was being
repudiated. Surely if anything could be safely predicted it was that the
religious ideas and institutions of the world were approaching some great
change."
"Doubtless," said I, "if the ecclesiastics of my day had regarded the
result as merely depending on the drift of opinion among men, they would
have been inclined to give up all hope of retaining their influence, but
there was another element in the case which gave them courage."
"And what was that?"
"The women. They were in my day called the religious sex. The clergy
generally were ready to admit that so far as the interest of the cultured
class of men, and indeed of the men generally, in the churches went, they
were in a bad way, but they had faith that the devotion of the women
would save the cause. Woman was the sheet anchor of the Church. Not only
were women the chief attendants at religious functions, but it was
largely through their influence on the men that the latter tolerated,
even so far as they did, the ecclesiastical pretensions. Now, were not
our clergymen justified in counting on the continued support of women,
whatever the men might do?"
"Certainly they would have been if woman's position was to remain
unchanged, but, as you are doubtless by this time well aware, the
elevation and enlargement of woman's sphere in all directions was perhaps
the most notable single aspect of the Revolution. When women were called
the religious sex it would have been indeed a high ascription if it had
been meant that they were the more spiritually minded, but that was not
at all what the phrase signified to those who used it; it was merely
intended to put in a complimentary way the fact that women in your day
were the docile sex. Less educated, as a rule, than men, unaccustomed to
responsibility, and trained in habits of subordination and self-distrust,
they leaned in all things upon precedent and authority. Naturally,
therefore, they still held to the principle of authoritative teaching in
religion long after men had generally rejected it. All that was changed
with the Revolution, and indeed began to change long before it. Since the
Revolution there has been no difference in the education of the sexes nor
in the independence of their economic and social position, in the
exercise of responsibility or experience in the practical conduct of
affairs. As you might naturally infer, they are no longer, as formerly, a
peculiarly docile class, nor have they any more toleration for authority,
whether in religion, politics, or economics, than their brethren. In
every pursuit of life they join with men on equal terms, including the
most important and engrossing of all our pursuits--the search after
knowledge concerning the nature and destiny of man and his relation to
the spiritual and material infinity of which he is a part."